Tsakhurs - Settlements

The traditional settlements of the Tsakhurs had a stepped, terraced, and horizontal layout. The oldest of them were situated in inaccessible, well-defended places. Typically their settlements faced south and were close to potable water, arable land, and pastureland. The streets, narrow and winding (sometimes like a tunnel), joined all the parts of a settlement and the main square. Around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth there were two types of settlement: the larger settlement and the small village. At this time the earlier territorial-kinship principle of settling an area underwent change. The kinship-based settlements consisting of one tukhum (extended kinship group, clan) grew and divided into quarters in which the members of several tukhums often lived together with their relatives. In each settlement there was a communal square (for assemblies, meetings, and holiday festivals), next to which was located the mosque. (In a series of settlements there were mosques for each quarter or neighborhood or block.) The Tsakhur also penetrated into the southern slopes of the main Caucasus chain, into Azerbaijan, where since ancient times they have migrated with their livestock to their winter quarters. In the eighteenth century and, more particularly, the nineteenth century, the flow of immigrants from Mountain Magai increased for economic reasons and has not ceased to this day. Many of these settlements received the same names as they had had in Daghestan. One supposes that some Tsakhur settlements also had existed in Azerbaijan in earlier times. In Soviet times some of the Azerbaijan Tsakhurs have migrated from the mountains to the plains and have founded new settlements.

Tsakhur dwellings evolved from the single-roomed to the many-roomed type. The most characteristic type at the turn of the twentieth century was the one-storied stone house with two or three rooms, a flat earthen roof, varying spatial layout (depending on the contour of the land), an earthen floor, and no yard. Farm buildings were erected separately. Rarer were houses with verandas on the southern side and two stories. Houses were built from stone, clay, wood, rushes. In the interiors the most remarkable things were the fireplaces within the walls and also niches (later, shelves) for keeping cups, plates, clothes, and bed linens; the room also contained jars for grain and flour (decorated with carving), large wooden plates and dishes for milk products, carpets (with and without pile) and on top of them pillows for sitting (many people lacked furniture). Weapons were hung on the walls and the pillars. In the family room of the older houses there were carved supporting pillars with a support beam and a hearth set in the center of the floor space (for heating purposes and baking bread); during winter the whole family warmed itself next to it. The Azerbaijan Tsakhurs, when building houses in the mountains and the foothills, maintained Daghestanian tradition (that is, the basic dwelling made of wood). In the plains houses were of brick (made of clay with admixtures of dung, straw, and/or horsehair) or wattle and daub and consisted of one or multiple stories with an attic and a gabled roof covered with rushes or straw. In Soviet times the Daghestan Tsakhurs, preserving the more basic type of one-storied house, have also been building two-storied houses (in one line, L-shaped or U-shaped) with two to five rooms, among which the guest room, with its wooden floor, stands out. The rooms have large windows and, facing the street, a facade with verandas (either open or glassed in). A cast-iron or stone stove provides heat. A granary with space for agricultural tools is on the first floor. Urban furniture has appeared, but rugs have been retained. The Tsakhurs of Azerbaijan build two-storied, many-roomed houses, most often as part of housing projects, with three-or four-planed roofs (of tile, slate, or iron) and small yards and vegetable patches.